juxtaposition develops a stark contrast between the smooth efficiency with
which the underworld dispenses justice and the unsatisfactory inefficiency
with which the legal system dispenses it. But the juxtaposition also empha-
sizes the catch: mob justice is much rougher, since Eddie is tried and wrong-
fully convicted by the rumor mill and then swiftly executed by Dillon. In this
way, Higgins suggests that the legal system, despite its flaws and deficiencies
that make good men question its efficacy, is far preferable. (I elaborate on this
analysis in chapter 10.)
As for the ethics of the telling, Higgins gives his rhetorical readers even
more room to complete the judgments about the ethics of the told than he
does in the final chapter. There are no surrogates here: it’s just his structuring
and the audience’s inferencing, his assumptions about his audience’s capaci-
ties and the audience’s trust that the juxtaposition is more purposeful than
arbitrary. In both this juxtaposition and in the final chapter itself, Higgins
provides another version of the default ethics of the telling since modernism.
AUTHORS, RESOURCES, AUDIENCES: A RHETORICAL VIEW
OF NARRATIVE COMMUNICATION
One admirable feature of Chatman’s diagram is its clarity. Can the rhetori-
cal view generate something comparable? Given that the rhetorical model
now identifies three mediated channels, each of which can interact with the
other two, I cannot simply swap out Chatman’s linear diagram for a new and
improved one. Indeed, the rhetorical model cannot be diagrammed in the
two dimensions available in the medium of the printed book. What I can do,
however, is present a chart of possibilities. This chart identifies—and privi-
leges—the two constants in the communication, the somebody who tells and
the somebody who listens, even as it identifies the multiple resources the teller
can deploy in order to connect with the audience. Here is that chart, the short-
hand for which is ARA, for author, resources, and audience.
Let me highlight several salient features of this chart.
(1) As the Etc. at the end of the middle column suggests, the chart delib-
erately does not claim to cover all the possible resources authors can draw
on. In part 2 for example, I will consider how authors can use ambiguity as a
resource. In addition, different media have different resources.
(2) The chart deliberately does not specify the exact relationship among
the constants and variables in any specific narrative communication. Those
relationships can vary greatly from narrative to narrative and, indeed, even
within the same narrative.
AUTHORS, RESOURCES, AUDIENCES • 25